Souvenirs of Sadism: Mahogany Furniture, Deforestation,
and Slavery in Jane Eyre
Elaine Freedgood
“The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out
of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is
changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet
on the ground, but, relation to all other commodities, it stands on its
head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more
wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.”
– KARL MARX, Capital, vol. 1
“Thinking guides and sustains every gesture of the hand. . . .We chose
the cabinetmaker’s craft as our example, assuming it would not occur
to anybody that this choice indicated any expectation that the state of
our planet could in the foreseeable future, or indeed ever, be changed
back into a rustic idyll. The cabinetmaker’s craft was proposed as
an example of our thinking because the common usage of the word
“craft” is restricted to human activities of that sort. However—it
was specifically noted that what maintains and sustains even this
handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness
to wood. But where in the manipulations of the industrial worker is
there any relatedness to such things as the shapes slumbering within
wood?”
–MARTIN HEIDEGGER, “WHAT IS CALLED THINKING”
“From today’s perspective, the subject of timber may seem a bit
obscure, but to generations past it was exceedingly mundane. No
contemporary resource can match timber’s preeminent ranking in
the pre-industrial world. Timber was not only the steel, aluminum,
plastic and fiberglass of past ages, but oil, coal, and gas as well. .
. . From the cradle to the coffin, the largest percentage of all past
material culture has been wooden.”
–Mills and Boon, Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil’s
Colonial Timber
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I. Furniture
Jane Eyre has been widely discussed as a text of empire; it has less
often been commented on as a work about interior decoration. Yet
this is a novel that is flush with the details of furniture and drapery;
in particular, Charlotte Brontë seems to have been something of an
aficionado of wood, and we would do well to note whose furniture
is made of what. At Gateshead, the residence of the despicable Reed
family, there is massive mahogany furniture. At Lowood School, the
teacher’s room is furnished in mahogany—undoubtedly in a plainer
style and probably in a cheaper variety than that of Gateshead—but
the students’ dining room has long “deal tables.” Deal—planks of
pine or fir—was the lowliest Victorian wood.
Indeed, mahogany and deal are two of the great class markers
in Victorian fiction: mahogany, which is always being polished or
burnished, represents tasteful opulence or nouveau riche groping for
the trappings of bourgeois arrival; deal, which we usually find being
scrubbed, can’t approximate the luster of the much more expensive
wood, but if it’s clean it connotes honesty and employment in some
form of hard work that doesn’t pay well. A third kind of wood gets
special mention in Jane Eyre: Thornfield has walnut-paneled walls,
and the Rivers siblings have several pieces of walnut furniture. The
“age of walnut” in English furniture history runs from 1660–1720,
so that possession of walnut furniture in a novel in which empire has
spawned much new richness indicates the relatively long duration of
a family’s gentility and lineage. The Rivers are cash poor now, but
their walnut dresser suggests they’ve got good blood (as does Jane,
their first cousin, as it miraculously turns out in this most improbably
plotted of realist novels).
Jane redecorates two residences in the last third of the novel:
Moor House, the home of the Rivers siblings, where she is taken
in by chance (no one knows yet that they are cousins) after she
leaves Thornfield upon learning that Rochester is already married,
and Ferndean, to which Rochester decamps when Thornfield
conveniently burns to the ground, taking Bertha Mason with it. Jane
avoids refurnishing Moor House too extensively; she allows this
rural cottage to retain its own history and culture in the fact of its
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plain, but old and elegant, furnishings. She most aggressively tackles
a few rooms that are only minimally furnished. Turning them, oddly
enough, into replicas of the infamous red room at Gateshead, she
fills them with the “old mahogany” furniture and crimson drapery
that contributed to her terror during her imprisonment in the room
where her kindly uncle died, taking all of her immediate prospects
of happiness with him. She thus creates for herself a souvenir of the
sadism she endured at the hands of her cousins and her Aunt Reed at
Gateshead; she makes it her own. Jane also buys souvenirs of what
might be described as another form of sadism: the deforestation,
colonization, and implementation of plantation slavery in the two
critical sources of wealth in the novel, Madeira and the Caribbean.
“Old” mahogany is probably, in the early decades of the nineteenth
century, furniture made in the age of mahogany, 1720–60, when this
wood, and furniture made from it, was still being imported in large
quantities from those islands.1
When Jane returns to the environs of Thornfield at the end of
the novel (after the famous Gothic eruption in which she “hears”
Rochester calling her name), an innkeeper tells her about the fire
that has burned down the house: “Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin;” he
says, “it was burnt down just about harvest time. A dreadful calamity!
Such an immense quantity of valuable property destroyed. Hardly
any of the furniture could be saved.”2 It is worth remarking that
furniture is of paramount importance; it takes about five more pages
for the innkeeper to mention Bertha Mason’s suicide during the fire.
And at the end of the novel, the first thing we learn about Ferndean
is that it “has been uninhabited and unfurnished” (455). We can only
speculate about Jane’s designs on this new residence—no specific
plans or purchases are mentioned—but the most important point
for now is to notice the benefit of unfurnished space in this novel.
Like the fictitious but still convincing “blank” spaces on the map of
empire, the idea of empty space invites the exercise of habitation
as a demonstration of power.3 The disposition of things in space
is also a way of externalizing an internal arrangement of objects
and of enacting, however unconsciously, a strict control over them.
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And it is no mistake that a character like Jane—tough, practical and
resilient as she is—would choose mahogany furniture.
Because mahogany, according to a handy little book called
Wood,4 is termite resistant; it is not subject to dry rot; it has little
tendency to warp or twist; it is hard-hearted, which is a good thing
for wood, making it dense and heavy; it has a fine straight grain and
it polishes up beautifully to a reddish brown hue. It also takes glue
exceedingly well, an important characteristic for Victorian furniture
making. The great size of mahogany logs and the strength of the
wood changed furniture design in the eighteenth century: very large
and yet still delicate pieces could be made; the intricate carving and
fretwork, skinny legs, and wafer-thin splats, seats, and table tops
that characterize much eighteenth-century mahogany furniture
might be imagined as attempting to ornately reverse, in the light
airy quality they produce, the literally and figuratively heavy legacy
of this wood’s arrival in England.
R. W. Symonds, in English Furniture from Charles II to George
II, recounts a curious anecdote about the advent of mahogany in
England; he cites A Book of English Trades (1823) as his source.5
In the late seventeenth century, one Dr. Gibbons had a brother who
was a “West India captain.” This brother brought some planks of
mahogany back from the Caribbean because he needed ballast on
his return journey to make up for the weight of the slaves he had
delivered. On his return to England, he gave the planks to his brother
Dr. Gibbons, who was in the midst of building a house. Initially the
builders employed by Dr. Gibbons found the wood too hard to work
with, but eventually he prevailed on them to make a candle box. The
beauty of the wood was so striking that he commissioned a chest of
drawers, which visitors admired immensely, and from this humble
start, according to Symonds, mahogany as a furniture wood began
to be imported into England in large quantities.
Jane can afford to refurnish and refurbish Moor House and
Ferndean because she inherits a large sum from her uncle, an
agent in Madeira of a trading company owned, in another almost
unbelievable coincidence of connection, by the Mason family in
Jamaica. During this period, Jane’s uncle, John Eyre, was probably
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exporting the very popular madeira wine to the West Indies and
Britain. Thornfield and Ferndean can be maintained because of the
proceeds of this trading company in Madeira and because of the
profits from a sugar plantation, also owned by the Mason family,
in Jamaica. Curiously enough, some of the finest mahogany once
came from Madeira and the Caribbean; indeed, in the Caribbean
the word “madeira” meant mahogany (as well as wine) well into
the nineteenth century. The world of Jane Eyre is decorated with
the literal and figural proceeds of Atlantic trade in these two crucial
locations. Both places were deforested of mahogany and planted
with the cash crops that allow Jane Eyre to furnish her world
with souvenirs, in the form of mahogany furniture, of the original
material source of her wealth. I’m going to argue in this chapter that
Jane’s purchase and placement of mahogany furniture symbolizes,
naturalizes, domesticates, and internalizes the violent histories of
deforestation, slavery, and the ecologically and socially devastating
cultivation of cash crops in Madeira and Jamaica.
In a recent book on consumer protest in the eighteenth century,
Charlotte Sussman has argued that colonial products like tea and
sugar made consumers anxious because they threatened to bring
home the violence that attended their production.6 This anxiety
suggests the ways in which acts of consumption were regarded as
moral choices at a moment that seems to be prior to the development
of the consciousness Marx called commodity fetishism. Rather
than being disavowed in the form of fetishes, the social relations
of production that inhere in commodities were still all too present
to protesting eighteenth-century consumers: an anxiety-reducing
containment system for such cultural knowledge had not yet been
developed. And for at least some consumers in the following
century, the social relations of production also remained available
to consciousness, but quite happily in many cases. The symbolic
compression of violence in mahogany furniture was not a source of
anxiety for a character like Jane—a poor, small, female person—but
a source from which to draw consolation and a sense of power. Jane’s
ability to buy this fetish means that she can avow and disavow its
history, and so can we: it will hide in plain sight in the rooms of her
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home and it will hide interpretively as a reality effect for the very
readers of the novel who would otherwise have made this connection
long ago, especially feminist and postcolonial critics who have been
confined, by critical canons, to allegorical modes of reading.7
The ability to read fables of gender into the nineteenth-century
novel, or to historicize the stories of poor governesses and creole
madwomen, has revolutionized the criticism of the novel, and without
it, the reading I do here would be impossible. But the intransigently
allegorical mode of criticism blocks the reading of the material
properties and relations of objects that don’t give us immediate
clues that will help us construct what we have come to understand as
literary, rather than literal, meaning. For “the allegorist,” Benjamin
reminds us, “objects represent only keywords in a secret dictionary.”8
In the secret dictionary of novel criticism—the dictionary about
which initiates must prove their knowledge—objects are weak
metonyms for the subjects they adorn or generic markers of the real
they indicate. The method of this book, that of the collector, requires
a moment of forestalling allegory and of taking things literally. My
project here is to imagine, like Benjamin’s collector, that “the world
is present, and indeed ordered” in certain objects.9 That ordering
is not an allegory, but a history. And it is not the history that the
novel narrates, but the history that the novel secretes: the history it
hides and emits, the one it conceals and produces as it calls to mind
the locations of deforestation and slavery for which mahogany is a
metaphor, a metonym, and a literal representation.
II. Forests
The geographical coordinates of Jane Eyre—Britain, Madeira, and
Jamaica—allow the novel to revisit and remember the violence
that inheres in the history and geography of British colonization,
slavery, and trade. The first step in these processes, wherever they
take place, is to clear land. If, as ecology and now ecocriticism
have taught us, civilization and forests have been historically at
odds with one another, empires and forests are particularly and
chronically in conflict. Robert Pogue Harrison points out that
“Rome . . . triumph[ed] over the great forest mass of the ancient
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world. The forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain,
Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole. The prohibitive
density of these forests had once safeguarded the relative autonomy
and diversity of the family- and city-states of antiquity, precisely
because they offered a margin of cultural privacy. . . . The forests
were obstacles—to conquest, hegemony, homogenization. . . . [T]hey
enabled communities to develop indigenously, hence they served to
localize the spirit of place.”10 Deforestation had already become a
serious problem in England by the sixteenth century. Measures were
being taken for conservation, and books were being written on what
would come to be called sustainable forestry. In 1598, for example,
John Manwood (a person obviously destined to do such scholarship)
wrote A Treatise of the Laws of the Forest, a work that anticipates
descriptions of contemporary ecology: “Before this nation was
replenished with inhabitants, there were many great woods full of all
sorts of wild beasts then known in England; and after the same came
to be inhabited, the woods were, by degrees, destroyed, especially
near the houses; and as the land increased in people, so the woods
and coverts were daily destroyed, and by that means, the wild beasts
retired to those woods which were left standing, and which were
remote from their habitations.”11 Acts for the preservation of woods
were passed to “safeguard future timber supplies” even before
Manwood’s work appeared.12 The aptly named Manwood, in other
words, is reflecting an environmental consciousness that is already
well formed by the late sixteenth century.
Jane Eyre remembers the deforestation of England: Jane comes
to understand, as a child reading Gulliver’s Travels, that there are no
elves left in England, because they have all gone “to some savage
country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population
more scant” (53). The deforestation of England was initially the result
of imperial aggression visited on Britain by Rome; it was extended
by the need for firewood and building materials—especially for the
ships of the Royal Navy, and by the aggression against the landscape
produced by enclosure—a process that was reaching the culmination
of its official, that is to say, parliamentary phase at the same time
that Jane Eyre was being written and published.
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The enclosure of common or unowned land seals the gate
against one of the final vestiges of feudalism in England: “the
commoning economy.” Commoners, the historian J. M. Neeson tells
us, were the last of the English peasantry; enclosure made them into
a working class.13 The “closing of the countryside”14 begets a new
class that must figure out how to get its living within an economy
that is unforgivingly modern and grossly underdeveloped, especially
for women, especially in rural areas. When Jane leaves Thornfield
on learning that Rochester is married, she arrives in the town of
Whitcross, asks what the “chief trade” of the place is, and learns
that some are “farm labourers; a good dealwork. . . at Mr. Oliver’s
needle-factory, and at the foundry.” Mr. Oliver does not employ
women, it turns out. Jane then asks, “[W]hat do the women do?”
She gets the vague but nonetheless accurate answer for much of
rural England at this time: “Some does one thing, and some another.
Poor folk mun get on as they can” (353).
In Jane Eyre, enclosure is imagined twice. First, at Lowood
School, where the whole system is writ small: “The garden was a
wide enclosure, surrounded with walls so high as to exclude every
glimpse of prospect; a covered veranda ran down one side, and
broad walks bordered a middle space divided into scores of little
beds; these beds were assigned as gardens for the pupils to cultivate,
and each bed had an owner” (80). Part of the making of the modern
individual, a process to which Jane Eyre the novel and Jane Eyre
the character made, and continue to make, a powerful contribution,
is this kind of competitive individuation: one girl, one plot of land,
one set of results accruing to each owner.
In this school and in its garden, Jane learns how to perform
another kind of enclosure, the enclosure of the self. When she
believes that Rochester and Blanche Ingram are going to be
married, she forcefully reins herself in: “When I was once more
alone, I reviewed the information I had got; I looked into my heart,
examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavored to bring back
with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination’s
boundless and tractless waste, into the safe fold of common sense”
(190). Subjectivity has no limits or boundaries: it is a wasteland, a
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